#31 · Tools & infrastructure

Total RNA profiling joins coding and noncoding transcripts in single cells

The dominant thread is single-cell transcriptomic measurement moving beyond polyadenylated mRNA. The published TotalX study adapts total RNA profiling to droplet-based single-cell platforms, capturing coding and noncoding RNAs in one pipeline and applying it to developing brain, the clearest case of joint, cell-resolved coding and noncoding measurement in this set. A second strand concerns temporal structure in transcriptomes: scRitmo infers single-cell circadian phases from scRNA-seq counts with posterior uncertainty and simulation-calibrated variance, and CHIRAL reports widespread 24-hour rhythmic transcripts across 45 human tissues, including neurodegeneration genes. These items share a focus on transcript-level readouts but not a common method. circStudio, an actigraphy preprocessing and modeling package, is a separate, non-transcriptomic item. What is new is the single-cell total RNA route to noncoding species, alongside phase inference that models rhythmicity explicitly at the level of individual cells and tissues.